After reading your post I do not see anywhere that he had radiation treatments. While all that I am going to say is 20/20 hindsight, if I were you, I would have these questions for your doctors. First, since a node involvement is never the source of the primary, why is it that no one early in the process checked the most common site for oral cancers, the base of the tongue? You do not mention any early scanning technology beings used, MRI's CT's etc. which would have also disclosed this early on, though base of tongue cancers are visible to the naked eye most of the time. In the US, a base of tongue cancer with node involvement is usually treated with both radiation and surgery, chemotherapy is usually used either in conjunction with these two (to augment the effects of the radiation) or as an add on procedure after the other two have been completed to systemically wash the body of any micro metastasis. The exception is in stage 4 cancers where non-local mets are assumed to exist. It sounds like he had a series of surgical interventions without the radiation to clean up local metastasis which frequently occurs and are not visible through conventional scans. It is generally ASSUMED that they (local mets) exist when there is nodal involvement, and therefore surgical only solutions are not the normal course of treatment in these cases. Since combined surgery and radiation are the standard treatments at most US cancer centers, for an advanced cancer, stage 3 or 4 (node involvement) why did he not have radiation treatments at the time of the original primary?

OK, so all that is in hindsight, primarily said to you so you can ask the questions and determine for your own sake if you are in good hand to continue or not with this medical team that you have been with so far. If you do not get satisfactory answers to those questions, you may wish to consider a new treatment team. I agree with Rosie